Well, except for Sharron Angle. (Oh, snap!)

But really, I mean it. The GOP doesn’t care about its Asian American candidates. They left their two Congressmen twisting in the wind when it came time to invest in races. (And the National Republican Congressional Committee had a LOT of moola to spread around.)

Esrtwhile RNC Chairman Michael Steele has said that one of his main goals is to diversify the GOP but he lost 2 of 3 Asian American GOP Congressmembers – Charles Djou of Hawaii and everyone’s favorite Republican, Joseph Anh Cao. of Louisiana.

Meanwhile, compare that to the investment that the Democratic Party made in APA candidates and in an APA field program this cycle. They hired an AAPI Vote Director at the DNC and fielded operatives to swing states. Moreover, they made an investment in APA candidates, from Colleen Hanabusa in Hawaii to Manan Trivedi in Pennsylvania. Candidates like Hansen Clarke in Michigan and Hanabusa in Hawaii picked up seats for the Democratic column.

At the federal level, a lot of this is due to DNC Vice Chair Rep. Mike Honda’s efforts to fund a community that is part of the Democratic base vote and his staunch advocacy of AAPI turnout. (Just ask Harry Reid.)

Plus California should have a new Asian American attorney general in Kamala Harris once the flurry of vote counting is over. The latest AP report has her up by 43,000 votes over Republican Steve Cooley with more than 9.3 million votes counted. Let’s just not imagine the inevitable recount and litigation nightmare.

Here’s the twist though – even if the GOP doesn’t care about Asian American candidates, they should care about APA voters. In California, it looks like that might be their last chance to even the playing field. According to a this Los Angeles Times article, “The party that wins Asian voters may benefit for decades”, comprehensive new poll by Greenberg Quinlan (see the crosstabs here), Asian American voters are more open to GOP candidates than other minority voters.

The poll provided a rare look at Asian voters, whose numbers among voters, estimated at 7% of the California electorate, are usually too small to analyze in detail.

If not as dominant a presence as Latinos, who were 19% of registered voters, Asians are also growing in number, part of the changing face of California.

“Somebody is going to have to mobilize them,” said Jane Junn, a USC professor of political science who helped design the survey. “If you get them now, you will get them and their kids and their kids’ kids. It’s a risk for the Democrats if they don’t mobilize them. It’s a risk for Republicans because if they don’t get Asians on their side, they’re gone in California.”

There were a lot of areas of commonality but the two sharpest area of contrast were on same sex marriage and how to fix our broken immigration system. Also interesting was the concern about the environment (but I’m going to chalk this up to it being a California poll. Sadly, I don’t see as many APAs involved in the environmental or environmental justice movement out East.):

On immigration, Asians agreed with Latinos on backing a temporary worker program and allowing undocumented residents to gain citizenship if they fulfilled certain dictates. And they favored a measure that would allow citizenship for those who graduate from college or serve in the military.

But they differed sharply on whether employers who hire illegal immigrants should be fined: Latinos disagreed and Asians strongly agreed. And on the emotional matter of whether illegal immigrants should be barred from services like emergency room care or public school admission, Latinos strongly disagreed and Asians narrowly agreed.

As a progressive Democrat, I think that the younger generation is moving fairly firmly into the blue column, but this poll looks across generations, and I agree that there’s room for the GOP to make in-roads. Voting Democratic isn’t something that’s permanently entrenched in most APA culture, except for possibly amongst Japanese Americans, who have some of the highest turnout rates and Democratic affiliation of any APA ethnicity, probably due to historical causes.

Building party loyalty is something that takes decades but you have to start somewhere. Running on ideas and a platform creates a base of voters who are willing to not only espouse your vision and values but who also go out and preach them. Which is ultimately better than investing in intimidation tactics that further drive generations of voters into Democratic arms. Encouraging folks to go out and having educational materials in language, a la the Murkowski campaign, is better for our democracy. And that’s a dialogue and a contest that I genuinely want both parties to join.

-Caroline